International Association
for Cryptologic Research

PHOTON is a lightweight hash function which was proposed

by Guo et al. in CRYPTO 2011 for low-resource ubiquitous computing

devices such as RFID tags, wireless sensor nodes and smart cards. In

this paper, we analyze Side-Channel Attack (SCA) resistance of FPGA

(Field-Programmable Gate Array) implementations of the PHOTON, when

it is used with a secret key to generate a Message Authentication Code (MAC). First, we describe three architectures of the MAC-PHOTON based on the concepts of iterative, folding and unrolling, and we provide their performance results on the Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs. Second, we analysed security of the MAC-PHOTON against side-channel attack using a SASEBOGII development board.